


Kettles and Bookshelves

by Ellie_Rosie



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Fluff, Home, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 17:26:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13194990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellie_Rosie/pseuds/Ellie_Rosie
Summary: Victor just wants his apartment to feel like a home, and a kettle is never just a kettle. A fluffy one-shot in which Yuuri settles into life with a Russian figure skater and his dog.





	Kettles and Bookshelves

 

“So you like the blue better?”

Yuuri blinked up at Victor, his fingers making pale streaks of moonlight amongst the thick forest of Makkachin’s fur. In Victor’s hand was a dogeared homeware catalogue from some department store or another, the sun at the centre of a galaxy of sticky-notes protruding from the pages. Yuuri sighed and untangled his fingers, at which Makkachin whined his protest, turning to narrow her eyes at Victor - because, _obviously_ , Yuuri was _her_ human, not Victor’s.

In the background, Yuuri could hear the pan on the hob. Over the recent days he’d become accustomed to listening out for it boiling over, hence their current problem.

“For the kettle?” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “I thought you’d decided on rose gold.”

Victor threw his arms emphatically up in the air, the slice of the action causing a few post-it notes to shower down like cartoon starfall.

“But that’s the problem!” When this didn’t seem to illuminate the issue any further, Victor added, “ _I_ shouldn’t be deciding!”

“Why not?”

“ _Because._ ”

Both Yuuri and Makkachin, seemingly in unison, tilted their heads to the side. Victor’s cheeks flushed into apples, and, for a moment, Yuuri suspected him of anger - but then no, that wasn’t right. When Victor got angry, he usually had no trouble verbalising what he was angry about. Victor’s cheeks, Yuuri realised, weren’t quite red, but they were pink. The hand that was gripping so tightly at the catalogue had a slight, barely perceptible shake to it. And - completely unnoticeable to anyone who hadn’t trained themselves to look - Victor’s eyes kept flickering around, from Makkachin to the television to the floor. His gaze occasionally crept to Yuuri’s feet, but never higher than his knees.

Yuuri’s look of confusion thawed into a soft, small smile that lifted his entire face into something even more gentle than usual. One side of his mouth was lifted slightly higher than the other, lifting the cushion of his cheek.

Victor was, Yuuri now realised, embarrassed. Not embarrassed in any trivial sense - this wasn’t about putting his white shirt in the washing machine with his red socks, or killing his little row of succulents on the kitchen window sill with too much water - but a deep flustering that Victor did not wear well. He was a proud man, Yuuri knew, and this sort of situation was a nightmare. So he patted the space next to him on the sofa, now on a mission to get to the bottom of the problem.

With Victor Nikiforov, Yuuri had learnt, a kettle was never _just_ a kettle.

Victor dropped down next to Yuuri, spreading the over-perused catalogue against his knees. Yuuri hovered for a moment, unsure if he should put his arm around Victor or not - physically, he was _still_ awkward around him, and it would have frustrated Yuuri no end if it wasn’t for the fact that, at least ten times a day, Victor insisted on it being adorable. That’s part of what Yuuri _loved_ so deeply and fundamentally about Victor; Victor didn’t expect him to change, and Yuuri found himself, quite possibly for the first time in his life, not wanting to. He didn’t think himself perfect, but he _did_ think himself perfect to _Victor,_ and that was all he needed.

He reached his arm around Victor’s shoulders, and the older man melted a little bit.

“What’s wrong?"

“The kettle.” Victor stabbed his finger against the catalogue’s open page. Sure enough, taking centre stage, was a fairly ordinary kettle; round, metal, a handle arching over the top, a spout sticking out from the side. The design itself held something nostalgic about it, whereas the finish, the exact shapes, were modern. The image on the page was tomato red, with rectangles of various other colours - rose gold, warm blue, millennial pink, for example - crowding around the sides. “What colour do you want?”

“Rose gold.” Yuuri pointed at the rose gold swatch, wondering if maybe something had gotten lost in translation.

Victor scowled, and Yuuri couldn’t help but shrink back a little.

“Why?” Victor’s hand splayed against the page. “Why rose gold?”

“Well.” Yuuri blinked, quite unsure about what it was he was _supposed_ to say. But then again, maybe that was the problem. With Victor, he wasn’t supposed to _supposed_ to say anything. He opted for following one of his mother’s old adages about honesty being the best policy. “It’s the colour you want. Isn’t it? If you’ve changed your mind back to chrome, that’s fine too.”

Victor’s jaw dropped as though Yuuri had just screamed obscenities at him. Yuuri, yet again, just blinked.

“See? That’s the problem!”

“You can’t decide between rose gold and chrome?”

“ _No.”_ Victor slammed the catalogue shut so hard that Makkachin’s ears jumped up, a tectonic twitch of a movement. “It’s not about the colour of the kettle.”

“What is it about, then?” Yuuri squeezed his arm around Victor’s shoulders and then, for good measure, patted his hand. Victor’s hand was cold and, before Yuuri could think about it, he was rubbing the older man’s palm between both of his, gentle, like trying to restart the heartbeat of a bird. His voice was a murmur as he said, “you can tell me.”

Yuuri kept gently kneading Victor’s hand into warmth, eyes to his task, trying to give the older man the mental space required to think. Thinking - really, _truly_ thinking, thinking in a way that _felt_ \- took time. And space. And _feeling_.

“The curtains,” Victor pointed, as though Yuuri might not know what curtains were. “Who chose them?”

“Well.” A beat. “You did, Vitya.”

“What about the rug? The coffee table? The television? What about the colour of the walls?”

Yuuri frowned. He couldn’t see what all this had to do with buying a rose gold - or blue - kettle.

“You did. Obviously.” He gave Victor’s hand another squeeze, and then let go, to gesture at the apartment as a whole “It’s all stuff you bought years ago. Before I lived here. So, unless Makkachin,” the poodle poked its head out from under the coffee table at hearing her name, “has a credit card, then it must have been you.”

Victor paused a moment, his mouth forming a little ‘o’ shape. Sometimes, Yuuri knew, Victor needed logical, reasonable things spelt out for him. He could get so carried away so quickly - which Yuuri _loved_ , loved the adventure and the excitement of it - that sometimes he needed Yuuri to bring him back down to Earth or, at least, to reason. 

“It’s just, this place is so - so _mine.”_ Victor’s shoulders rolled in a round shape, like he was trying to encapsulate the definition with his body. “Before you came along, it was only an apartment. Now it _feels_ like a _home_.” His entire being swelled with the force of the emphasis. Yuuri thought it looked exhausting. “But it doesn’t _look_ like one. It’s all me.”

“No,” Yuuri said softly, after taking a moment to let the meaning of it all saturate him. He couldn’t help but smile. “No, it isn’t.” When Victor still didn’t look convinced, Yuuri got up and walked over to the bookshelf. “Here. Come and look.”

Yuuri could feel Victor looking over his shoulder, the soft warm glow of him, like bright yellow sunshine in the corner of a child’s drawing.

He gave Victor a moment to look.

Their bookcase consisted of three shelves, in a brown-silver wood. The top shelf was non-fiction, a blend of recipe books, biographies of great skaters and history books that Yuuri found a comfort in reading, in knowing that all of these things had happened and that they were indisputable fact; they were grounding. The second shelf comprised of romances, crimes and thrillers, arranged by height (they had been arranged by colour, until Victor had gotten bored one day and decided it was time for a change). The bottom shelf was a blend of the classics, from Tolstoy to Tanizaki, and poetry, from Anna Akhmatova to Basho. The shelves, in front of the books, were littered with various trinkets and detritus of everyday life; a small framed photograph of Vicchan, a snow globe depicting St Basil’s Cathedral dusted in white, a coupon for a nearby restaurant, a curled up piece of paper scrawled with various international phone numbers.

Yuuri smiled to himself, confident that he’d found the perfect metaphor.

“Do you get it?” He asked, turning so that his nose touched Victor’s cheek, the older man quite literally looking right over his shoulder. To his dismay, he saw that Victor was still squinting rather intensely at the shelves. “Some of these books are yours, some of them are mine, and a couple are borrowed from friends. But put together, they’re _our_ books. Everything is all mixed up, see? Japanese books and Russian books and English books. All together. Because we just fit together, just like that. Like fingers slotting together,” his hand found Victor’s, “when we hold hands. You put some in, I put some in. There's no _making room_ for anything or anyone, because we fill the spaces in each other. We fit. Like music to a dance.”

Concerned that this wasn’t quite enough, he led Victor through to their bedroom.

“Look, see? It’s the same in here. The socks on the floor are mine, the blanket on the bed is Makkachin’s, and the shirt on the back of the chair is yours.” 

Victor’s lips twitched. A breakthrough. 

“Don’t forget the lion plushie.” Victor pointed to the small, abnormally rotund soft toy that sat on the end of the bed, it’s mane fanning out in thick, cotton candy tufts. “Yurio got us that for your moving in present.”

“Exactly. This place is a _home_.” Yuuri felt Victor’s arms knot themselves around his waist, and he lent back into it. It felt like floating in a perfectly still ocean, all the troubles and worries of land a million miles away. Victor was his life raft, his island, his _home._ “Whether we have a rose gold kettle or a blue one won’t change that.”

Victor gave him a squeeze.

Yuuri could feel the warm curl of a chuckle forming in Victor’s chest even before the Russian spoke.

“What about a chrome one?”

Yuuri smiled so hard that it hurt.  _Yes_ , he thought,  _this really is home._

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you liked it! It's been a loooong time since I last wrote a fanfic, so I hope it wasn't too terrible. 
> 
> Happy New Year!


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